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It’s one of cinema’s most totemic roles: 007. If we ignore the spoofery of 1967’s Casino Royale, six actors have slipped into the tuxedo since Sean Connery first said “Bond. James Bond” at a card table in Dr No (1962), each putting their own particular stamp on the world’s most famous spy. We had the Welshman who brought Shakespearean gravitas, the Australian who lasted one film, the Irishman who drove an invisible car. None of them were without their merits. But who did it best? Who, when all is said and done, is the definitive 007?
6. George Lazenby
Spare a thought for Mr Lazenby. Spotted by Cubby Broccoli looking debonair in an advert for Fry’s chocolate, the Australian former car salesman only made a solitary outing, in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, before promptly walking away, forever fated to prop up literally everyone else on this list.
His director, Peter Hunt, said at the time of casting, “I am not saying he is an actor” – and the film bears this out: he’s wooden in the romantic sequences, defeated by the one-liners, and so insufficient in a pivotal dinner scene that his voice is dubbed by another man entirely. There is none of Connery’s suaveness and wolfish authority.
And yet OHMSS, with its breathtaking skiing sequences, Diana Rigg’s magnificent Contessa Tracy, and Louis Armstrong’s title song, is still one of the finest Bond films ever made, named as a personal favourite by Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh. Imagine if it had starred a better actor – not just a 29-year-old clothes horse who clinched the role at audition by accidentally punching a stuntman in the face.
5. Roger Moore
Moore gets a bad rap. A clubbable dandy in flared trousers, with an arched eyebrow and a quip for every occasion, his Bond is a little underrated. Give him a terrible line of dialogue and he’ll twinkle it into something worth laughing at. Do the same with Daniel Craig and it lands like a wet towel on a cold floor. Not that Moore’s output – seven films across 12 years – wasn’t wildly uneven. By A View to a Kill, he was 57 and creaking as much as the plot; in the Star Wars-inspired Moonraker, meanwhile, he amplified the camp quotient to offensively self-parodic levels. But respect the man for the way he purrs his way brilliantly through The Spy Who Loved Me – the sleekest, most purely enjoyable film of his tenure. Too long in the tuxedo, certainly. But the tuxedo suited him.
4. Pierce Brosnan
For millennials, Brosnan is the archetypal Bond: charming, impeccably coiffured, and possessed of a smile that could defrost a Russian winter. From the moment the man from County Louth announced himself as 007 in 1995’s GoldenEye, with a dizzying jump from a vast concrete dam, I was gripped. Call me sentimental, but I still think that film – the first Bond my dad took me to see at the cinema – is a bona fide classic. It’s more than just nostalgia, though: tonally pitted somewhere between Moore’s and Connery’s, his Bond not only has megawatt charisma and a knack for making a cringe one-liner sound cool, but displays a deeper psychological complexity. Boy, though, was he hobbled by his subsequent outings (the slick, soulless Tomorrow Never Dies; the lamentably cheesy The World Is Not Enough; the catastrophic Die Another Day). The films, in other words, were not enough.
3. Timothy Dalton
Dalton’s Bond is the one that history has been slowest to appreciate. Too sullen, some said – a world away from the velvet-tongued charmer viewers loved. But the Welsh thespian’s interpretation was a cocktail of deep romantic melancholy and cold, flinty intensity. As a counter to the wink-wink-nudge-nudge Moore era, it was just the tonic. His two-film tenure was frustratingly brief; you sense he had much more to give. Consider The Living Daylights: one of the best films in the franchise, it moved with vim and verve from Cold War glitz to Moroccan swashbuckling, Dalton as good in it as anyone has ever been in the role. Licence to Kill is a different beast. The first in the franchise to carry a 15 certificate, it’s grittier and grimmer, with a jagged edge.
Plaudits, definitely, for Dalton’s willingness to take risks: his thirst for revenge in the latter film very much paved the way for Daniel Craig’s white fury in Quantum of Solace. Alas, Licence to Kill was the lowest-grossing Bond film of that era, and he was swiftly jettisoned in favour of Brosnan. His legacy over time has been rightly burnished.
2. Daniel Craig
Remember the backlash when it was announced in 2005 that Craig was to be the next Bond? Too blond, they said; too graceless. Not sufficiently urbane. They were wrong, of course. The 2006 iteration of Casino Royale reinvented the franchise entirely: granite-faced and built like a squaddie, Craig’s 007 was a stone-cold brute nursing a broken childhood beneath that tailored suit. The actor was at his best in the underrated Quantum of Solace, his double-O there a clenched fist with emotions bleeding through the knuckles.
Craig wasn’t without his failures. Uncomfortable delivering a well-timed quip or innuendo, he looked visibly shackled in Skyfall and Spectre (he did say in 2015 that he’d rather slash his wrists than play Bond again). But what he gave the franchise was something none of his predecessors had delivered: a Bond for whom you feared.
1. Sean Connery
The OG Bond and the benchmark against which Craig and co have all been measured. An outsider from working-class Edinburgh, schooled in classiness by director Terence Young, Connery gave 007 the icy insolence of a parvenu beneath that lacquered surface. His was the template: a sophisticated thug who could dispatch a foe without ever raising his pulse. Not that all of it has aged gracefully: the treatment of women, for instance. And by Diamonds Are Forever, brought back into the fray after Lazenby’s departure, he looked adrift in all that Vegas fur and farce. But at the height of his power – which is to say, across his first three films, especially the taut, Hitchcockian From Russia with Love – he was indomitable. No Bond since has matched him for rugged, effortless masculinity.
Connery made 007. Everyone else has been trying, in their own way, to keep up.
